Science is incapable of ever being truthful because every scientist is an amoral wannabee friend of Jeffrey Epstein. These nerds literally take lessons in school to learn how to beg for patronage to do research. Of course their studies usually end up being about managerial bourgeois praxis like using skull shape measurements to categorize workers. That's what personality psychology is about at the end of the day, Brave New World style eugenics with humane empathy for wage slaves.
I find this impulse to redeem astrology in the left fucking weird. If we don’t want to be associated with Reddit STEM bros who hate it we should just be silent on the issue. But just because something is popular with LGBT people doesn’t mean it’s not a load of nonsense that’s obnoxious to bring up in literally every damn conversation fucking ever, like seriously why does EVERY GODDAMN convo with a new person I meet have to open with what my birthday is so they can chart out my fucking personality for me!
Sorry, I live near an art school.
I feel like there's a broader impulse on the left to dunk on Facts and Logic / Rationality™ stuff. And that's good, but specifically it's good because the Ben Shapiro / New Atheist versions of those things are bad facsimiles of empiricism and rationalism, not because empiricism and rationalism are actually bad. It would be a pretty huge self-own for the left to divorce itself from science. Real Lysenko hours.
Yes. Ceding science to the right is a huge mistake and a betrayal of Marxism.
Communism has always embraced science, and I remember the CPP on either RevLeft or Prolespod talking about wanting to create a more scientific and less superstitious society as one of their central goals.
rationalism is dumb. it has no value to me, a stupid fuck.
It's literally harmless. Perhaps you should stop talking to art students.
I’m gonna disagree with the “it’s totally harmless” line. It is for like 90% of people into it, but I’ve also seen the other 10%. It can be a gateway into other pseudoscientific thinking, I’ve seen a lot of astrology people get into anti-vax shit. And on a more interpersonal level some start taking it so seriously it starts affecting their relationships, like they can mediate any conflict with a family member or friend without a discussion of their astrological sign to the point their loved ones get fed up talking to them about it. I’ve seen breakups happen over this.
And beyond that, as I mentioned above, I think it’s obnoxious and rude to demand everyone you know have a discourse with you about something they believe in but other dont. We wouldn’t hesitate to call this out if it were Christians injecting Jesus into every convo or STEM bros demanding to know everyone’s Briggs-Myers or IQ, but for whatever reason people demanding they know your sign before they talk to you gets a pass.
Yeah, the woo woo astrology/anti-vaxx to Q Anon pipeline is a real thing. Q Anon Anonymous has done a few episodes on it.
Literally who though, this is some real fucking everyone clapped shit but no one is questioning it since obviously those people are all crazy or whatever.
Hun?
I mean yeah my evidence is all anecdotal but I promise you I ain’t lying. Maybe I’m just in an area with a bizarrely high amount of people who take astrology ridiculously too far, but if you go on astrology YouTube and Twitter you’ll probably find some figures to back up what I’m saying. They probably won’t be the most popular ones but they’re out there.
wait so you're appealing to imaginary evidence, come on. if you're going to talk about figures you should provide them.
edit: for future reference I assumed he meant figures as in statistics and this argument would have been a fifth as long if I hadn't misread his comment
I really don’t know if any organizations that gathers hard statistics on things like “how many astrology nerds are weirdos who take it too far and are obnoxious about it.”
We’re putting anecdote against anecdote here. The “it’s totally harmless” camp doesn’t really have any hard data to back up their assertions, it’s all just anecdote for them to. I don’t know why the counter claim needs a doctoral thesis to back it up.
If you're going to claim there's evidence and then run that back I reserve the right to assume you're not arguing jn good faith lol
I openly admitted my evidence was anecdotal and anecdotal evidence is what I provided. Also my claim was in response to another claim that “it was totally harmless” and that guy didn’t back it up with any evidence so why do you go hound him for some.
And this all circles back to my main question, why do so many on the left seem hell bent to defending the valor of astrology? I didn’t advocate outlawing it or being mean to people who were into it, fuck I said it was harmless 90% of the time. I just said I didn’t think it was 100% harmless and that was enough to get some debate bros jumping down my goddamn throat.
people are jumping down your throat because astrology hate is usually just unexamined misogyny/queerphobia
Okay that’s true, but on the flip side you got people trying to stan astrology so hard they end up saying ridiculous crap like this.
Science is incapable of ever being truthful because every scientist is an amoral wannabee friend of Jeffrey Epstein. These nerds literally take lessons in school to learn how to beg for patronage to do research. Of course their studies usually end up being about managerial bourgeois praxis like using skull shape measurements to categorize workers. That’s what personality psychology is about at the end of the day, Brave New World style eugenics with humane empathy for wage slaves.
And I’ll repeat myself, if you’re gonna demand hard evidence for my claim you should present hard evidence for yours. If there’s evidence that it’s TOTALLY harmless I’m all ears.
If all you have are anecdotes my anecdotes are equally valid.
You know I didn't invoke evidence right? you implied its existence and I called you out for making shit up.
You know I admitted my evidence was totally anecdotal right? And you still made a claim, I made a counter claim, I’m beholden to the same standard of evidence you abided by for your initial claim.
but if you go on astrology YouTube and Twitter you’ll probably find some figures to back up what I’m saying.
edit: wait oh shit did you mean the other kind of figures
if that's the case than I've been making a scene over a total misinterpretation
Yes I meant figure heads.
Apparently the QAnon podcast did a deep dive into the overlap between astrology and other, more harmful conspiracy theories. Maybe check it out. Again it’s harmless most of the time based on my experiences but not totally.
absolutely not
-a queer black woman
people hate astrology because it isnt fucking real and its annoying when people try to pretend like it is, and even worse when they bring it up unprompted to everyone else. why would i, a black queer woman who has been beholden my entire life to my identities, seek to box myself into yet another determinative identity aka my StAR sIgN? if anything in my personal experience astrology seems to be yet another thing white queers and white women use to prove that they have any type of spice, something that usually fits right in with their life long quest to abstract themselves from the fact that they are just as white and just as rich
karen u are not a libra you are a gentrifier and your black neighbors would really wish youd stfu
yall wanna examine every single little star and what it means like its a 7th grade sleepover at the friend's house who dont got an xbox, but dont even wanna examine racism and what your actually doing to cause it. if you want a new agey movement examining our personal relationships with each other, and to the greater world, fine. but do fucking racism first.
i saw white tenderqueers after george floyd's murder talk about how it makes sense that he'd spark a whole new movement because he's a libra and libra's have the scales of justice in their sign. like....yall need to stop (if you dont believe simply type into twitter "george floyd libra" and youll see)
stop using my identities to excuse ur brain worms.
as far as im concerned theres nothing lana del rey isnt doing that these astrology white tumblr girls arent
maybe i am hyper sensitive and good at listening to others because im a pisces or maybe i just grew up black and extremely poor and learned that i have to be hyper intune with what people are saying in order to give myself a head start on potentially needing to protect myself. maybe the stars and the universe, and the implied sensicle moral arc of the world that somehow allows slavery and rape to happen (but definitely is right about brad liking you), will have something helpful to say about this.
wasnt it famous feminist philosopher marlyn frye who said that the biggest mistake men make (and what seperates them from women) if that they believe the universe is knowable? i guess now we know astrology and girlboss feminism go hand in hand
I mean I'm definitely not saying your contempt for astrology is recycled sexism or queerphobia. But I get the impression that the source of the problem is that white people are hostile to examining their understanding of race. If astrology wasn't present they'd just hide in their prescriptions of hogwarts houses. In that case I'm willing to concede that people use things like astrology to avoid having to grapple with reality.
Besides that, do I not have a point about contempt for something strongly associated with queer people and women being used to smuggle in contempt for those groups? Doesn't that happen all the time? Like libs scoff at professional wrestling because it's associated with poor people. It's classism in a paper mask.
so i do think that reddit stem white dudes malign astrology in a way that evokes the normatively dismissive way they look at anything queer and feminine but when you consider that the thing they are dismissing is accurately being dismissed as stupid, its hard to really defend astrology IMO by virtue of the fact that those who take part in it are dismissed on a greater societal level.
yes women and queers historically have a specific way of seeing the "universe" that should be respected on its own, that feeds into astrology , but astrology itself is still so fundamentally dumb that it kinda supersedes that.
also astrology does not have its roots in queerness /feminity or even in the west....so its not even created in response out of queer or feminine struggle, it seems to be just something people picked up one day. (something can still be a showcasing of a marginalized person's struggle if its adopted along the way but this is not whats happening here)
this kind of reminds me of how in the 20th century black americans created this collective black identity /view of the ancestors we descend from: egyptian kings and queens, who were all regal and hyper intelligent aka the whole "we was kings meme". This identity was created due to the fact that black americans as a whole did not know where they came from/ didnt even have a last name reflecting their own lineage/ had been primarily characterized by their white owners rather than by themselves. In response, black americans created this BS egyptian identity of we was kings. But that doesnt mean that the identity they created wasnt BS. While i would think that white people who criticize that fake egyptian like identity are being a little too privileged to have a real take on the matter, this is not whats happening with the reddit stem bros when they take on astrology ---something that is dumb enough on its own and not real and not tied to a similar cultural context
i think new agey movements that dont address material concerns/ pledge to do something about them can be escapsim for privileged people.
i also do think that queer and feminine ways of thinking are great, but sometimes have their own failings that should be pointed out, because while reddit bros are homophobic and sexist, there are those on the other side (SJWs) that run with certain theories/ways of being in an unquestioning way and on the virtue that it is a feminine or queer way of thinking that is really damaging. I.E. the tenderqueer phenomenon which is best described here: https://dollyrose.substack.com/p/the-cursed-privilege-of-the-tenderqueer?fbclid=IwAR1NIAM1n6BlGuQZ7BIlKCUKQ9b1QH8szCLkRwyRQDl53ih5cQnQ7xFiaYk
i think astrology really annoys me because even though it is enjoyed by a certain group of people, i also think it speaks to certain weird, privileged, filtered through and just plain toxic (lol buzz word) dynamic girls and gays inact on each other, sometimes under the banner of being queer or being a woman (kind of like how white gay men think being queer means being mean to everyone)
like the tenderqueer persona, astrology determines ways of being/ interpersonal reaction/ ways of processing information based on meaningless signifiers (astrology signs). queer and feminine community should be and has to be more genuine IMO///also queerness as a concept is about interacting within the material world and actively fighting against it (aka Queer as in fuck you) which does not seem to jive with astrology
The tenderqueer phenomenon definitely stinks to high heaven to me. I see what you mean about how astrology could be deployed in service of that kind of hyper individualistic behaviour.
Making a salient point about how something that's strongly associated with queerness, femininity, and spirituality gets an inordinate amount of hate for what it is? Gee, I wonder if there might be some unexamined prejudice against those things on a website whose userbase was almost exclusively imported from Reddit?
a classmate slapped me once for "being a leo" and I'm not even a leo
that's been my only experience with people into astrology
A tinder date once made a massive scene in a cafe because, as a joke, I decided to tell her I was a different sign than I was. When I told her the truth she quite literally lost it.
Goodness. I hope she's calmed down. I have heard a lot of anecdotal stuff like this from associates and coworkers about astrology, but I've never encountered people who were deep into it except one very strange classmate. My one coworker says her sister always asks people what their sign is before deciding if they should even talk to them, like a weird manufactured elitism over birthdays.
I can't really despise astrology too much though, even as this personality tier list thing it seems to be sometimes, because in my hometown the personality ranking systems are just racism and classism.
I can vaguely understand the astrology interest among women and LGBTQ+ folk, some kind of alternative structure for understanding yourself and others, unless I'm also misunderstanding that. I'm a complete idiot and have had such little exposure to this stuff. Everyone around where I live believes astrology is devil worship and child sacrifice.
don’t want to be associated with Reddit STEM bros
Accepting that this is a way more fun way to be than just trying to be right all the time is the first step to being cool
the scientists who researched evolution and global warming were wrong because capitalism forced them to ask for money and that's actually what they were in it for
The scientists who researched evolution, you mean like the 19th century European guys? Cause they were mostly wrong and it was very damaging
So evolutionary biology didn't provide the philosophical pretext for European exploitation of Africa by justifying the classification of black people as genetically inferior? Oh sorry coulda sworn that it did, nvm me
You're right because European exploitation of Africa definitely didn't begin centuries before Darwin. Are you intentionally being obtuse?
Early evolutionary biologists held heinous views with regard to human evolution, no one disputes this. But frankly, white supremist views weren't unique to scientists in the 19th century. I'm not even really sure what your point is? Early biologists projected their racism onto human evolution, sure, but this in no way invalidates the entire field. They definitely weren't "mostly wrong" because as far as I know evolution is still our best way understanding speciation.
Are you intentionally being obtuse?
Yes.
You're right though, white supremacy had to already exist in order for evolutionary biology to work towards fabricating a scientific basis for it, which it did. And imperialism had to already exist in order for that fabrication to then justify New Imperialism, otherwise it wouldn't have been 'New'. Darwin had already been dead two years when the Berlin Conference rolled around.
The 'mostly wrong' this is mostly a semantic trick though, you got me there. That is more due to refinement than anything, any field 100 years on is going to be able to contradict most of the assertions of its forebearers
Edit: didn't realize this was in the science comm, probably wouldn't have posted like this if I had, but ah well it is what it is
Yeah around 25% of the people here are minors apparently
Doing research to better understand mental health :geordi-no:
Believing in fucking idealistic pseudoscience :geordi-yes:
sorry I'm a caprisun and we don't believe in astrology
edit: I also wonder what OP's opinion on the COVID vaccine is
You say “every scientist is an amoral wannabee friend of Jeffrey Epstein”, but this is simply not true. In fact, a lot of science stands to challenge capitol directly by pointing out the flaws in our current system of unabated growth, for example climate scientists showing directly how carbon emissions impact the environment, or sociologists exposing the negative impacts that ruthless capitalistic processes have on communities. Science is, in fact, one of the most potent tools we have in challenging the current structures that are making life worse for so many people. In fact, if you get to know more people who choose to devote their lives to science, you may find that they align with your views more closely than you may think - after all, we’re talking about a group of intelligent people who, (for the most part) rather than using their time and energy to pursue business or finance, chose instead to make less money by studying the world we’re all a part of.
Edited to be more accurate:
"Science is incapable of ever being truthful under capitalism because every scientist
is an amoral wannabee friend of Jeffrey Epstein. These nerdsliterally has to take lessons in school to learn how to beg for patronage to do research."Are we taking a guy with the username time cube evangelist seriously, come on guys lmfao
